Thessaloniki Hails 26th Edition Of Documentary Festival Which Overcame “Episodes Of Violence And Intolerance”

deadline.com:

The Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival is coming off a successful — and at times turbulent — 26th edition, wrapping “amidst an explosive ambiance with episodes of violence and intolerance.” In a post-festival report, TiDF says 66,000 spectators and visitors participated in the event this year, an increase of 16 percent over 2023.

The festival ran from March 7-17 in Greece’s second largest city, nestled in a gulf of the Aegean Sea. “This year’s TiDF hosted a great number of premieres, exciting talks and special events, and welcomed the internationally acclaimed artist Dimitris Papaioannou,” the festival noted in its report. “Moreover, it bestowed honorary Golden Alexanders to the Academy Award-winning Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba and the Greek film director, screenwriter, author and translator Panayotis Evangelidis.” TiDF hosted more than 300 in-person screenings at several venues, as well as showcasing 133 documentaries through the festival’s online platform.

The concurrent AGORA film market played host to the Thessaloniki Pitching Forum and the Docs in Progress sidebar. “The festival has been going from strength to strength in recent years, so we couldn’t be happier,” TiDF Head of Programming Yorgos Krassakopoulos tells Deadline (he is also head of programming for the separate Thessaloniki Film Festival, a narrative-oriented event that takes place in November). “We were hesitant when we started if we would have to sacrifice the quality in order to get premieres and stuff like that.

But the short answer was no.” Krassakopoulos adds, “Through the years we have made wonderful discoveries through films that were blindly submitted to us from people that we might know from shorts or that have passed